As your final journal entry, I want you to look back to what you wrote in week 1 for the “Why are you here?” question and reflect on what you have learnt and how you have changed.

Did you discover something that you didn’t expect?

I went into the Game Design course expecting to discover many things that I wouldn’t have thought of, so in that way I did not (as I was expecting to learn something I didn’t expect to learn). However, the more surprising things I learnt were:

1. The many ways that a game is ‘polished’. For example, if I was to design a game I would not have thought about having the style of the game resonate in the menu system!
2. Malcolm’s ability to make the entire class run from one end of campus to another on the word of a Russian…

Do you have a new perspective on games or game development?

I certainly have a new perspective on game development. There are many aspects of games that I had not even thought of when developing. I also have a deeper appreciation for games as an art form.

Where do you think you’ll go with this in the future?

For now game design will remain a hobby, as I finish my degree. But in the future I don’t know what part game design will play.

How do these games make you feel?

These games are incredibly depressing. They induce a feeling of helplessness and any feeling of control given in other games is ripped away from you.

How does the gameplay contribute to the feeling?

In Home, the slow moving protagonist already induces a feeling of helplessness as you cannot perform all these simple tasks in time. The inevitable decline as your protagonist’s independence is incrementally taken away from him brings about the above mentioned helplessness and depression.

In Missing it is the repetition of asking people the same questions and showing them the posters in the hope that the son will be found. It is the repetition and ultimate helplessness of these actions which slowly crushes your spirit as you ‘progress’ through the game.

Consider the question: are games art?

Games certainly can be art. But just as not all paint on paper is art, so not every game is art. Games are another medium with which to present a view, a moral, a story, anything that other art mediums attempt to present.

Do games offer meaningful moral choices to players?

Games can certainly present moral choices, however how meaningful these choices are is debatable. To make a meaningful choice there needs to be a consequence. Games cannot give a true consequence to the player, in terms of morals, as that will require the player to feel a level of ethics about the situation. Someone who is abhorrent towards murder in real life will happily shoot up a drug dealer in a game which allows or asks it. How meaningful can a moral choice be if the consequence of such an action is negligible?

Should they?

As an art form, games should certainly present moral choices and dilemmas. Games have a great capacity to present issues and moralities in a new way that can challenge a person’s preconceptions, and one way of doing this is to present these ‘moral choices’. Without emphasising them, however, the player may just do what they think will finish the game, or finish the boss, or simply progress them in the game.

Can they?

As said above, I do not believe that games can offer meaningful moral choices. Though they can certainly present moral choices.

What is necessary to make a moral decision meaningful anyway?

Again, as said above, moral decisions are made meaningful by having consequences. If shooting someone just means they will come back a few seconds later, the consequence of shooting someone is removed. There is no pain, no broken families or grieving relatives, the shot player does not feel anything above a mild frustration. To make a moral choice meaningful, the choice must have consequences whichever choice is made.

Search YouTube for Crayon Physics and see what kind of solutions people have come up with. Consider:

What different kinds of approaches do people take?

People take a variety of approaches to solve the variety of problems on offer in Crayon Physics. Some people try and use as minimal design as possible, while others build intricate monstrosities that almost defy imagination.

What is it about the game that encourages different approaches? How do the visual/audio aesthetics contribute to this feeling?

What encourages different approaches is the game’s sensory aesthetics. They call to the childish side of the player, particularly with the use of crayon style for drawing on the canvas. Also, each level general keeps the objects already in the world at the start of the level to a minimum, truly making it look like an empty canvas waiting for the creative mind of the player to apply themselves to come up with a creative solution.

What is the role of story in games?

Story can, and has, played a range of roles in games. Some games use the story merely to set a vague context in which to explain the actions of the player. Other games are little more than films with some additional interaction added in. A story’s role, predominantly, is to enrich the game experience by giving a meaning and a consequence to a player’s actions. Sometimes this story may have a set start and finish, so the consequences of a player are predetermined, but when the player is in the game they do not necessarily know this.

Is it really possible to make a game tell a meaningful story?

In my opinion, I believe that games could tell both meaningful stories and also stories that the player can directly relate to, having experienced them through the game. An example is the flash game Elude which has an abstract storyline about the cycle of depression, the game’s story is made all the more meaningful as you have experienced the cycle of depression.

How do the constraints of narrative mesh with the freedom of play?

If implemented correctly the narrative should compliment the freedom of play, giving the player a purpose and a design to work to, rather than just mindlessly doing tasks. Moving a block from one part of the game to another under a time limit is alright, but it becomes exciting when the block is some damning evidence and the time limit is being enforced by a squad of elite mercenaries.

Storytelling in a game medium is different to other mediums. The story should develop with the player, rather than the player being led along a story.

Read Ernest Adam’s article on Sandbox Storytelling. Do you agree?

Ernest gives some convincing arguments in favour of Sandbox Storytelling. To give players the maximum freedom as well as having things tie together, Sandbox Storytelling appears to be the way forward.

These sorts of games require a level of patience, and the skill to play them effectively generally requires knowledge of how these games work.

What makes learning fun?

Personally I find learning more fun when the medium it is in also entertains. For example, during my high school years we were shown a video during Chemistry depicting this crazy looking scientist who would exclaim “Wow! What a reaction!” at the end of his experimentation. Because of his entertaining catch-phrase I now always remember to never throw Sodium into water, as it will explode. Similarly, the BBC’s “Brainiac” TV series used the allure of a bikini-clad model to teach which fruits would float in a body of water.

It is how compelling the audience finds the material that will ultimately determine how fun they find learning about it. While it would possibly be useful to teach many simple lessons using bikini-clad models to gain attention, having a lecture with the same model would just be distracting. The amount of material and entertainment needs to be balanced.

Can you remember any teachers who really made learning ‘come alive’ for you? What did they do to make this happen?

There have been a number of teachers who have made the material more understandable and entertaining than others. Generally it comes down to making the material understandable and having an interest in bringing the material across. For example, learning the material in this class is fun as it is entertaining to begin with but the lecturer also has an interest in having the class understand the material. This combination of not being frustrated by the material, and having a teacher who enjoys teaching the material is all it takes to make the course compelling and interesting.

What about things you learnt outside of school?

Other things I have learnt have either been to defeat a game or just because I was in the mood to learn about it.

Come up with a multiplayer game that pits one chosen player against the combined forces of the rest. Try to balance the game so that it is interesting and challenging for everyone.

The game idea I came up with was a cross between a tower-defence game and a first-person shooter. The one chosen player plays the game similarly to a tower defence game, placing towers to defeat the encroaching monsters. The rest of the players are the monsters trying to reach the base.

The balance between the two sides would come from the differing amount of knowledge the two sides would have. The one player would be able to see everything on the map and be able to act accordingly, the many would have a more limited scope of view and need to work as a team in order to overcome the towers placed by the one.

Art would probably be similar to Team Fortress 2, i.e. non-photorealistic rendering. As the game is basically a group of people ganging up against one, a more jovial art style would make this less confronting. The one would be a maniacal evil-genius, and the many would be those trying to stop him/her.

Where is the fun in this game?

The game offers little in the way of challenge or coherent storyline, all the game’s enjoyment comes from the mystery and discovery.

How do I know what I am supposed to be doing?

Beyond the basic controls, the game does not explicitly instruct you to what your purpose is. However there is a level of intuitiveness about what you are meant to do. When you start the game your view of the world is extremely limited: your view is very zoomed in on your avatar and the areas you have not seen yet are blacked out. As you move and explore, the viewpoint zooms out and the blackened areas are filled in with the newly visited part of the world. This revealing and zooming out is what makes the exploration intuitive, the game wants you to discover the world, to fill in the blank spots.

What makes you continue playing? (or not?)

I enjoy discovering new areas, so the main mechanic of discovery was very appealing. Because there is a lack of information about what to do, you continue hoping to find some answers. For this game to appeal to others, however, would require them to have similar interests to me.

If a player did not enjoy the pure aim of discovery, then they would more than likely not enjoy this game. Small Worlds appears to be fairly narrowly targeted, though many people would still enjoy the discovery element of the game.

What difference does the controller make to the experience of gaming?

The controller being used makes a huge difference to the gaming experience. As the controller is the main interface the player has to the game, changing the controller can greatly change how the player interacts with the game. Whether a controller is intuitive is dependent on the context of the game genre.

For example, a flight simulator is more natural with a joystick than with a keyboard due to the fine-tuned degree of movement the joystick offers. However, a joystick is not as intuitive as the WiiMote for interacting with a tennis game as the WiiMote allows the player to swing the controller around as if it were a tennis racquet.

The level of intuitive interaction the player has with the game inevitably determines how engrossed they are with the game.

Are “motion controllers” such as the WiiMote and the Kinect a good thing?

The WiiMote and Kinect are a good innovation for a number of reasons, namely:

• Intuitiveness: Each controller can be used in certain contexts to make the interface to a game extremely intuitive
• Accessibility: If implemented correctly, a game could use these controllers to allow less physically able people the ability to play games too.

However, while these controllers have the benefits listed above, it would be easy to violate these benefits. The controllers have an amount of novelty surrounding them, so developers may (and have) used this novelty to sell otherwise poorly designed games. Also, the current implementations using these controllers do not make them more accessible, but less.

What about the Emotiv headset?

The Emotiv headset does have the potential to be a highly accessible and intuitive controller (as it is a direct read of your brain pattern). However, it is dependent on how well it lives up to it’s description and how the games take advantage of the technology.

Is this a good direction for gaming?

These movement based controllers are an excellent direction for casual gaming, but have yet to show their full usefulness in more classical gaming.